On January 12, the Mentor Program held its first Career Panel of the year, covering the topics of entrepreneurship and engineering in two sessions in Nichols Auditorium during long lunch.

The first session featured Gary Gauba, CEO and founder of Cognilytics, Inc.; Charles Huang, Executive Vice President (EVP) of Business and Development and co-founder of Guitar Hero; and Ram Reddy, founder, Chairman, and CEO of Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

The second session featured Gary Brezockzy, Chief Technology Officer at Renew Medical; Sundari Mitra, Executive Vice President of Engineering at MoSys, and Kathleen Yan, a Senior Research and Development (R&D) Engineer for Abbott Vascular and Class of ’96 alumna.

The guest speakers shared their personal stories and philosophies, addressed truths and misconceptions about their respective career paths, and gave advice on pursuing those professions, ending with a short question and answer session.

The speakers come from diverse backgrounds and retain a connection with the school community; selecting the speakers in this way “help[s] children network with those people that are so involved with Harker give a common ground,” said Mary Ellis Deacon, Special Assistant to the Executive Director of Advancement.

Executive Director of Advancement, Joe Rosenthal, was happy with the student turnout, which during the first session filled most of the middle section and as much as a third of the adjoining sections of the auditorium.
Rosenthal hoped students would leave the panel with two things in mind: “One is an awareness of what it takes [to be an entrepreneur or engineer],” and the second, “inspiration […] to follow their beliefs and not give up [easily] and [not] just listen to somebody say it’s not going to work.”

Students seemed receptive to what the speakers had to say.

Saloni Gupta (12) believes the three-speaker panel was better than previous ones she that had attended; however, she would have liked to hear more about the particular details of the speaker’s jobs.

“One of my questions for them was what was one of your day to day routines, what does that look like, what do you do in one entire day?” she said.

On the other hand, Tara Rezvani (10) felt that this level of specificity was sufficient for the student body.
“[The panel] wasn’t necessarily [about] all the technicalities of their jobs, so they overviewed on what they did, but it told us how to get there, and that necessarily what you’re going to start with isn’t what you’re going to end with,” Tara said.

Abhinav Khanna (11) agrees that it “was really nice to hear some real life stories about people who were actually brought into engineering and became successful engineers.” However, he felt that in the second session, students could have prepared more questions to have more of a discussion.

Following that consideration, Rosenthal will allot just one session of speakers during one long lunch period for the next career panel on February 16, holding a question and answer session “for as long as the students have questions.”